It's incredibly heartening to those of us who are grinding away at designing the next generation of Perl to know that at least some folks "get" it.

Apocalypse 5 ("Regexes and Parsing") will be released in the next day or so and it's going to be a prime example of that "stealing from the rich" philosophy. Regexes are going to change Big Time (e.g. imagine having the full power of yacc/RecDescent native in Perl!)

There will no doubt be much kicking and screaming about some of the fundamental changes we're planning. But we're doing it precisely because certain other languages currently do some aspects of pattern matching and parsing very much better than Perl. So we'll steal their ideas, perlize them, and end up surpassing the originals.

So we'll steal their ideas, perlize them, and end up surpassing the originals.

Regexes are someplace where this "steal and synthesize" philosophy has worked so well. Perl's syntax has been all encompassing yet revolutionary, so much to the point that the things Perl copied have come around and copied Perl. It's interesting to see Perl as a filter, gluing together cultures - operating systems, individual languages and tools all stealing from Perl, but really stealing from someplace that was outside of their field of vision.

I think that it should also be noted that Perl has gone from stealing ideas abut regexes to making them up before anybody else does. Regexes as a whole (outside of Perl, as well as in) need a serious cleanup, and this is a place where we've taken all these ideas and synthesized them, and now realized that we need a whole new language for expressing that synthesis. I say "feh" to those who balk at Perl 6 regexes - even if we don't get it right, someone has to try, and Perl has always been about the dirty jobs.

Cheers,
Erik

Light a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Catch a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchet

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other